Five things I do not want to be forced to listen to again

1. "The problem with gay marriage is unelected courts trying to impose their will on the people. Our problem isn't with the content of the decision, it's with the process by which it was made."

The bigots won their vote in Maine, so can we lay this one to rest for good now? The reason people have a problem with gay marriage is that they have a problem with gay people. That's all there is to it.

2. "The results on Tuesday mean that x is true for 2010."

The results, at most, might suggest some general things for future elections. They don't mean that the public repudiated Obama or his agenda. They don't mean that the conservatives have officially destroyed the Republican Party. Corzine has been at negative favorability for something like two years. People like that tend to lose elections. Hoffman lost in part because he was a terrible candidate and there's every chance that he (or an actual Republican) will win the race 12 months from now. And so on. It was like 10 elections total. It's nothing.

The underlying trends which helped drive these few elections in some interesting directions may hold firm for a while longer. So NY-23 may be a sign of coming fights. But that has basically nothing to do with the results of the election.

If the economy is still crappy in 9 months the Democrats are going to lose a lot of seats. If it's not, maybe they won't. If they can't pass a health care bill, they're going to get slaughtered. If they do pass a health care bill, maybe they won't. That's about it.

3. "When the economy’s not strong there’s a lot of interest in controlling spending."

Ben Nelson has really gotten on my nerves this year.

4. Anything about the Yankees that's not this post from Joe Posnanski.

Seriously, I hate the Yankees.

5. The new Amy Millan album

How did someone involved in "Elevator Love Letter" make something so bland? Sigh.

You don't understand, you just steal my plan

Not So Fast - The Lodger

The Financial Times reports:

Republicans complain they are being forced into an artificial timetable that is reducing the chances of agreement. People on both sides of the committee, chaired by Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator, say the chances of the law being passed by the year-end, as planned by the administration, are slight.
“The more time we [take], the more intelligent regulatory process we’ll have . . . and I hope we’ll take until the first quarter of 2010 to actually put something into law,” said Mr Corker.

Tim Fernholz responds:

What in the world does he want to talk about? It's not like Corker is pushing some specific agenda or has offered any major ideas, at least publicly. These issues have been at the forefront of the policy debate for a year now, and certainly have been bubbling underneath for a long time. If he doesn't have any specific concerns, its hard to conceive of this as anything but a delaying tactic that simply substitutes vague delays for substantive engagement.

The 'too fast' complaint is a constant annoyance for me. The important thing you have to remember is that "too fast" is almost without fail simply code for "I don't want this to happen." There was an argument that something like TARP or the PATRIOT act were done too quickly and with not enough oversight. Those were bills where the perception (fair or not) of imminent threats got people mobilized to act quickly.

But 99% of the time, the one complaint you CAN'T leverage against Congress is that it moves too slowly. It's an institution designed for a world where communication took place by horse or sailboat transposed into a time of cell phones and twitter and the blagosphere.

Take health care. After 2+ years of presidential campaigns where it was one of the two or three central issues. After almost a full year since a president and huge Democratic majority were elected on the back of a mandate to fix it. After 40 years since the last major reform to health care. After all that, you've still got GOP senators complaining about how fast this is all moving. If only there had been just a little bit longer to talk, then maybe something could have been worked out.

Of course, this is not helped at all by a media that absolutely adores the 'too fast' meme. It allows you to run a process story that SOUNDS like it contains meaningful content but does not actually require any digging. 'Too fast' itself serves as the complaint - no one ever demands that you articulate what precisely it is that ought to have been included. In general, there appears to be extremely little interest in questioning the motives of those making such complaints. And it's understandable why. To identify this possibility would be tantamount to accusing them of making claims in bad faith, which is dangerously close to the l-word which must never be spoken.

I've talked before about the tension between my belief that there is value in discourse and the material reality of 'discourse' as performed in modern politics. So I don't want to say that we should toss the ideal overboard, but at least in the case of this 'too fast' meme I do wish there was an expectation that those advancing it actually be prepared to discuss the content rather than form of their argument. To borrow a metaphor, we should trust but verify. Starting from the assumption that your opponent is speaking bad faith is a poor way to engage in public reason. But I don't think it's too much to ask that they actually uphold a good faith argument rather than mouthing platitudes.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum says basically exactly the same thing as me, literally while I was writing this. Though he also notes that Afghanistan is the one area where taking time to consider options is absolutely unforgivable: "Then it's "dithering" and "playing Hamlet."

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein, too. Is there a run on making this point today??

More on NY-23

One more thought on the NY-23 election. Or rather, the same thought on NY-23 but coming at it from a slightly different angle.

I think Jon Chait makes a fair point:

Rich paints Scozzafava's heresies as minor. But suppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic metaphors? There's a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you're not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

I do think it's a little weird that the people chortling to themselves about the insanity of the conservatives shooting themselves in the foot on this are a lot of the same folks who are all in favor of pursuing primaries to bump out moderate Democrats. In particular, they're the folks who are right now (correctly, of course) pointing out how much better things would be if Ned Lamont was sitting in the CT-Sen seat.

Now, I agree with them on the content. I'd rather have a Congress full of Lamonts than Hoffmans. But accusing conservatives of being naive and stupid politically for attempting to push aside people who don't actually embody the core values of their side doesn't gel very well with holding a variation on the same attitude toward moderates on your own side.

I think the really powerful innovation in Democratic campaigning that distinguishes the Clinton years from the Obama ones is the way that folks like Howard Dean managed to put together a new coalition. One where folks in 'safe' Democratic seats are expected to act like it, while those in more marginal ones are given a bit more freedom.

Yes, it does cause endless frustration with your Nelsons and Bayhs and Landrieus. But the problems are, I think, much more about the institutional structure than they are about the failure of this particular political strategy. There simply is no way that we're going to end up with 60 strong progressives votes in the Senate. It's fantasy to expect it. Given the electoral and procedural constraints of the Senate, you have to be willing to make deals somewhere along the way.

You absolutely do need folks on the wings attempting to pull the party outward, but you also need a strong concern for the center as a mechanism for generating some sense of balance. The problem for the Republicans right now is that things fell apart - the center couldn't hold and now they're a rump party: run almost entirely out of the CAPS-lock wing.

That's why the scary thought is the possibility that such a rump party might actually manage to return to a significant degree of power without any of the restraining elements. It's a lot harder to do things that way, but oh the havoc you can wreak if it does work out.

Your tainted heart, my tainted love

23 - Blonde Redhead

A friend asks:

"Is this NY23 thing a big deal? Perhaps more importantly, do we want it to be (I can't tell whether I want the Republicans to implode after a long season of infighting or return to the middle so that elections can be about more reasonable things again, assuming they ever were)?"

These are fair questions. I think the best take I've seen so far is from Jonathan Bernstein here and here. The takeaway is that the race does matter, sort of. And the dynamics of it are almost certainly bad for Republicans, but they're not necessarily that great for Democrats either. This race has clarified something that was already pretty obvious: 'mainstream' Republicans are simply not welcome in modern conservatism.

That will certainly make it harder to recruit the sort of moderate candidates who might be necessary to take back a lot of the more vulnerable seats that the Blue team won in 06 and 08.

At the same time, Hoffman has a pretty good chance of winning this thing - despite being a Glenn Beck-ite, which can't be very comforting for Democrats. Sure, NY-23 is a traditionally Republican seat, but Obama won it and it "shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada." Running against a fringe candidate should have made this a solid chance for a pickup.

Of course, while every seat matters, a swing of two votes in the House right now is pretty irrelevant. The real question is what effect this has on 2010 and 2012. And there it's all about the gamble. If there is a major sea change in attitude and the Republicans can manage a ton of pick-ups despite running candidates like Hoffman it could spell serious damage for Obama, the Democrats in general, and the idea of a sustainable new progressive majority.

On the other hand, if those gains fail to materialize, we could end up with an increasingly apocalyptic minority that spirals down the drain for another few cycles before they get things back together.

My take: Hoffman could very well win, though in a race with so many crazy twists and turns prediction is probably futile. In the longer term, I think the gamble isn't going to pay off. Districts that can support candidates like Hoffman already have them - they're the 40% of districts the Democrats haven't been able to pick off in two landslide elections. Unless there's some major external problem (scandal, crisis, or most likely a dragging economy that shows no noticeable improvements for the next 12 months), the GOP has a much better shot of putting a dent in the Democratic ruling majority by running RINOs (and then having to put up with their occasional apostasies).

But Jeebus save us all if this pays off. We could seriously end up with the same kind of united, categorical opposition from a party with enough power to literally shut down the government for a few years.

And either way, I think we're in trouble for awhile re: the goal of having elections be reasonable. Regardless of who wins, it's going to be close, and that's going to be enough to make this a template for a lot of other elections driven by Sarah Palin endorsements, breathless coverage, and total ridiculousness.

A case for majoritarianism? - part I

Frank Luntz, GOP strategist, says the following:

The Democratic Party controls a 77 seat majority in the House and almost 20 seats in the Senate, along with the White House. If they cannot get a bill passed with such overwhelming control of Washington, it says there's something wrong with the legislation. Rather than forcing a bill through with only limited support, they should keep working until they can get a bill that represents the opinions of most Americans.

Now, it goes without saying that his statements have to be read with an eye on the clear political goals. What he says isn't meant to analyze; it's an attempt to persuade. But there's still a limit (or should be). In this case, it's the idea that people who might be on the fence here are going to be persuaded by the argument that the legislation must be bad if they can't get it done despite those majorities. Now, let's think about this for a second.

First, the idea that they "cannot get a bill passed." It's a little early for that isn't it? After all, the entire point of his memo is to convince people not to pass a bill. Will he admit that it WAS popular after all if it does happen? Also remember that the GOP has consistently complained about the speed with which this legislation has moved through the process. "Just slow things down a little bit so we can consider more." Whatever you think about that request, it's a little hard to take it seriously when it runs concurrently with arguments which suggest that the test for whether a bill is acceptable is if it passes quickly.

Then there's the way that huge Democratic majorities are treated as unrelated to the rest of the question. The tone clearly suggests that Democrats were just randomly gifted with big majorities. Never mind that a lot of those people won contested elections where health care was a pretty big campaign issue. Usually it's not a very compelling argument for your position that 60% of the races went against it.

What does Occam's Razor tell us? What we've got is a health care bill which has strong support from well over 50% of elected officials and (most likely) the public. Which is more likely: that there's somethign wrong with the legislation or that there's something wrong the legislative process?

Really, this is a jumping-off place for some broader thoughts I've been having recently. I've been reading a lot in the past couple weeks about variations in democracy: in particular, the differences that come with a majoritarian, parliamentary system compared to the Madisonian republic that we've got going on here in the US. There's a lot to be said for a system of checks and balances but situations like this do not put it in a very good light.

Even if you support checks and balances, there's a pretty strong argument against the multitude of veto points that we've set up. Perhaps some are essential, and maybe we dig the idea of bicameralism in general. But it does seem like we've got to a bit of an extreme here. Five committees, each of which have to pass a bill. Two houses of Congress which then have to pass a combined bill. And then those bills have to get blended. And then each house has to pass the blended bill. And the whole time, if it ever looks (even for a short period) like you don't have a clear path to your preposterous 60 vote majority needed to beat that filibuster the whole thing teeters on the brink of political oblivion.

Maybe it made sense to make it this hard for Congress to pass things back in the days of the Federalist Papers when our main fear was legislative tyranny or things moving too quickly and getting out of hand. But our institutions have only gotten more sludge-filled even while society has sped up about 700 million percent.

It's time for a change. The question mark in the title signifies my general confusion about how far we want to take things. The filibuster (in its current form at least) has got to go. But how much further should it go? Do we want to risk tyrannies of the majority? Sure, majoritarianism sounds good to me now when health care and global warming are on the line, but how will I feel when Jeb Bush is in office?

These are tough questions and I don't have a firm answer. But in part II we'll see if there's a compelling case for majoritarianism as fundamentally progressive, even accounting for these problems.

That thesis has been rendered invalid

In my life, I have attended four truly excellent shows. Lots of good, even great ones - but only four that were transcendent.

1. Carissa's Wierd, Valentine's Day, 2003. The Decemberists opened and it was the first time I had ever heard them. So that was a wonderful surprise. But it's really all about my favorite band at the time playing an absolutely beautiful set.

2. Bruce Springsteen, November 18, 2007. I can only imagine what it would have been like to see him back in the 70s.

3. Okkervil River, September 25, 2007. It was almost religious.

4. They Might Be Giants, Bumbershoot, so long ago that I honestly don't know what year it was. 1998, probably.

The thing that was so amazing about the TMBG show was the absolute control they had over the crowd. You have to understand that Bumbershoot is this massive 4-day long festival in Seattle over Labor Day weekend with about 7 million different shows, arts and crafts, food, and an almost unbelievable number of people. Basically all the shows are free - you just pay a general admission to get into Seattle Center. The result is that you get a LOT of folks at shows who aren't really fans of the band per se. Or haven't even heard of the band perhaps.

For this show, they were in the old Mercer Arena - which is a seriously big space for a band like TMBG. Just to offer some perspective, it's the same place I had seen the Smashing Pumpkins a few years earlier on their Mellon Collie tour. So it had all the makings of a crowd that was not going to be terribly receptive to the John's unique style.

Which is why it was such a wonderful experience. A few songs in people were up and dancing and cheering like crazy. A bit later they had what had to have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people up doing a conga line. And when they did roll out an "Istanbul" or "Particle Man" that people were familiar with the entire place was singing along.

I bring all this up partly to reminisce but also as a way of pointing out that TMBG are still around - and if they have never managed to put together an album that matches up to their work of the 80s and early 90s, they still know how to put together a great song now and then. What's more, they are clearly still enjoying what they do, experimenting with styles, subjects, and the like.

Meet the Elements - They Might Be Giants

Hence, the new album Here Comes Science, which follows their recent kid-friendly albums but in a more explicitly educational context. Effectively, it's the most fun album you'll ever here that includes lines like "Chlorophyll cells take in carbon dioxide" or "Plants, bugs, birds, fish, bacteria and men / Are mostly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen." Admittedly, I'm a bit of a nerd about this sort of thing, but honestly who can turn down a band this earnest about actually trying to communicate legitimate science?

The absolute best part of it is the problem of their long-played standard, a cover of the 60s-era song "Why Does the Sun Shine?" It's a great song and they've been playing it so long that it clearly needed to be included. But, as often happens with science, the theories of past eras need to be reformed based on new evidence.

When they were fact-checking this one, they ran headfirst into a pretty big problem. The hook for the song is, of course, "the sun is a mass of incanescent gas." But, it turns out, that's not what the sun actually is. As we all know these days, the sun is actually composed mostly of plasma. So what's an enterprising band to do? Write an answer song of course. The result is back-to-back variations on "Why Does the Sun Shine?" the latter of which closes with an emphatic: "Forget that song, They got it wrong, That thesis has been rendered invalid."

The other big highlights are "Meet the Elements" which is as exuberant as anything they've done, "Roy G. Biv" which, of course, helps us to remember the color spectrum, and "Cells" which tells us why some things turn into kangaroos and others turn into Dwight D. Eisenhower.

They've got videos for the songs, too, which you should definitely check out.

You don't know what to do, so you do anything you like

Change - Lightning Seeds

Health care is dead because of the town halls. No wait, it’s totally revitalized because of Obama’s big speech. And in fact, it’s basically inevitable because Olympia Snowe voted for it out of committee. And look, not only is health care inevitable, but the public option is going to pass because Harry Reid grew a backbone. Or, it turns out, it’s dead because Lieberman and Nelson and Landrieu and company are against it.

My general feeling about all this is there’s a lot of fuss about the swings because we all love a news cycle, but that the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. All year I’ve assumed that health care had a strong chance of passing, but that what actually made it to Obama’s desk would be a lot weaker than the folks on the blue team would have wanted. In short, I haven’t varied too much in my best guess that odds were probably 2:1 in favor of passage, but that a public option was extremely unlikely (unless in one of its most diluted variations) and that subsidies were not going to be as high as they really needed to be.

That’s what I thought in January, in May, in August. And it’s more or less what I think now.

Perhaps the biggest real change has been the revived potential for the public option. This, I think, was genuine news. The underlying dynamics started to shift over the summer with a massive liberal pushback on this issue and the willingness of the House and Senate leadership to really work for it.

That said, I still don’t think things have tilted THAT much. It’s not that I really think any of these ‘moderates’ would be willing to take responsibility for filibustering a health care bill because it contains a generally popular program that will reduce costs and – in the worst case scenario – will simply fail to displace a meaningful portion of the private insurance market. When push finally comes to shove and there’s an actual bill that needs to pass, these folks are probably going to vote for it regardless of disagreements at the margins.

The reason why I still don’t expect a strong public option is that even if we can be reasonably sure Evan Bayh is not going to derail the single most important piece of progressive legislation since LBJ over something so trivial, we can’t be sure. And more importantly, the White House and Democratic leadership can’t be sure. They all want a public option, of course, but they simply want a bill more.

What could be very interesting is the deals that take place assuming the stronger opt-out version does actually end up in the bill. How long will the supporters fight for it? How hard? Are they willing to play chicken on this? As things drag on, are they going to keep together the votes needed to shoot down GOP amendments as they pile up and up and up?

My guess is no. At some point, the leadership is going to loosen the reins, tell the wavering members that it’s okay to kill the opt-out. And the best case scenario will be that all of the fighting on this will have shifted opinion about where the ‘center’ is on this question sufficiently that the other side will take a trigger option that isn’t totally pointless (i.e. – that has meaningful targets).

Recent twists and turns might have changed things a bit, but I’d still wager that health care reform will pass before 2010, and that whatever variation on the public option that it includes will be so watered down as to be (relatively) meaningless.

Until things change again in a few hours.

You're smart enough to make the numbers appear

Idiot Son - Loud Family

More health care posting coming tomorrow (hopefully). But for right now, a few thoughts on Joe Lieberman (#@%$#&%, CT):

At this point it is clear that he is a massive tool and I completely take back all the things I ever said about making nice with him. I get a fair number of predictions right - and tend to consider myself a fairly astute judge of political stuff - but good lord did I get this one wrong. My theory was that he would want to win another term in 2012, would see the value of tacking back left, and would deliver a solid vote on domestic issues (which were going to be the things most in need of filibuster-busting). It turns out that he apparently is only interested in lashing out like a petulant, spoiled child.

Now, I don't take his posturing on this all that seriously, and I don't think it spells doom for health care reform writ large or even necessarily this variation on the public option. But Jesus H. Christ he is ridiculous. That someone who can demonstrate such utter lack of character or empathy can exercise such influence over the political process is only a sign of how broken our system is.

And don't even get me started on the fact that this guy was one Supreme Court pang of conscience away from the Vice Presidency

Going off the deep end

Alan Grayson was briefly a hero in the progresso-sphere, as a sort of liberal counterpart to Michelle Bachmann. Except, as people loved pointing out, while he was uncivil he was actually (more or less) stating things how they actually were. People loved him for that, and that was all well and fine. But there was always danger in trying to set up a liberal equivalent to Michelle Bachmann...namely that he would quickly steer into bomb-throwing for the sheer sake of it. Which may very well be what's happening.

All of which only solidifies my belief that the truly progresssive response to lunatics like Bachmann and Glenn Beck and the like is reasoned discourse. We can't out-shout them, and the more we try the more we're adopting a form of rhetorical engagement which plays into their hands.

There's the old Clinton line: "if one candidate's trying to scare you and the other's trying to get you to think...you better vote for the person who wants you to think."

Well, he's right. All other things equal, the more that people think the more we win. Which isn't to say there's no rational argument for a conservative position, obviously. It's just to say that on balance conservativism is an attitude of disengagement. Vitriol, screaming, and general nuttiness aren't intrinsically conservative, but the type of communicative process they embody certainly trends that way.

Tired of feeling cold and alone

The Odds - Saybia (from Eyes on the Highway)

I don't even care about basketball, but I can't help but point out the breakdown in logic in this recent post by Matt Yglesias. Taking issue with Bill Simmons' prediction that the Trailblazers will go 41-41 he says:

To merely go 54-28 again would require the team to regress somewhat. To win 41 games would involve a regression as big as the step forward that would be require to win 75 games and become the greatest team of all time.

Yikes.

What is missing in this analysis is a recognition of the importance of 'regressing to the mean.' Put simply, on balance any performance is substantially more likely to revert to the mean performance of the pool from which it is drawn than it is to go further toward the extreme.

In this case, the pool is professional NBA teams and the mean is (obviously) .500. All else being equal, we'd assume that any team who wins more than 41 games is going to do worse in the next year, and vice versa. And the further away from the mean, the harder it will be sustain their performance. And it will be particularly difficult to improve.

Like I said, I don't care about basketball, but the principle is pretty important for a lot of areas. It's the general idea which helps us remember that exceptional economic performances are...well...exceptional, and thus unlikely to be sustained or improved upon. It's what reminds us that if we gamble and win, it was still a gamble. And if we try again, the odds are much closer to 50% than they are to 100%.

In short, it's a principle which we very easily lose track, meaning that we end up making extremely important decisions based on a false sense of security derived from a relatively small sample size. Forgetting to regress to the mean, and failing to gather a significant enough amount of data to minimize the effect this causes, is a deadly combination: whether it's for sports predictions or the global economy.